Saturday, April 05, 2008

The New Attorney General Lies About FISA, Starts 9/11 Controversy

Glenn Greenwald is going to single handedly make this story happen. Why doesn't the 9/11 Commission know about Mukasey's 9/11 story?.

"Last week, during a question-and-answer session following a speech he delivered in San Francisco, Attorney General Michael Mukasey revealed a startling and extremely newsworthy fact. As I wrote last Saturday, Mukasey claimed that, prior to 9/11, the Bush administration was aware of a telephone call being made by an Al Qaeda Terrorist from what he called a "safe house in Afghanistan" into the U.S., but failed to eavesdrop on that call. Some help is needed from readers here to generate the attention for this story that it requires.

In that speech, Mukasey blamed FISA's warrant requirement for the failure to eavesdrop on that call -- an assertion which is, for multiple reasons that I detailed in that post, completely false. He then tearfully claimed that FISA therefore caused the deaths of "three thousand people who went to work that day." For obvious reasons, the Attorney General's FISA falsehoods themselves are extremely newsworthy, but it is the story he told about the pre-9/11-planning call from Afghanistan itself that is truly new, and truly extraordinary.

Critically, the 9/11 Commission Report -- intended to be a comprehensive account of all relevant pre-9/11 activities -- makes no mention whatsoever of the episode Mukasey described. What has been long publicly reported in great detail are multiple calls that were made between a global communications hub in Yemen and the U.S. -- calls which the NSA did intercept without warrants (because, contrary to Mukasey's lie, FISA does not and never did require a warrant for eavesdropping on foreign targets) but which, for some unknown reason, the NSA failed to share with the FBI and other agencies. But the critical pre-9/11 episode Mukasey described last week is nowhere to be found in the 9/11 Report or anywhere else. It just does not exist."

He's followed it up and it made it to Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow but not much further. Either the Atorney General lied and made up a story to change the FISA law or the Bush administration blew it even worse on 9/11 and then (I think illegally) covered it up to the 9/11 Commission.

Greenwald wrote to the DoJ for clarification and got a response from Peter Carr, its Principal Deputy Director of Public Affairs which he then proceeded to rip apart.

Digby wonders if it's worth speculating on the conspiracy theory aspect.

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